My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [35]
In other words, channeling Nancy Reagan can make the difference between dreading and loving Mondays.
Do Try This at Home: Top Ten Client List
Resist the urge to put off handpicking your clients until you’re more established, better paid, or better known. And don’t listen to anyone who says you can’t carve out a new niche if you didn’t immerse yourself in the wonderful world of travel journalism, pet care, or consumer electronics straight out of school. Like an aging pop star, you can always reinvent yourself. At any point in your career. No high-price publicist needed.
And forget about silly twentieth-century marketing hangovers like blanket-mailing ten thousand brochures to every business within a sixty-mile radius. Your time’s better spent making a short list of clients you want to work for and doing your darnedest to win them over. Even if you’ve been freelancing awhile, I encourage you to do this little exercise. It’s all too easy to get stuck in the steady-money, bread-and-butter rut and forget why you came here. (Does “variety of projects, bigger and better clients, and time for your own creative work” ring a bell?)
So get out your pencils, people, because it’s time to make a Top Ten list of the companies or individuals you’d most like to land as clients in the next year or two. Be sure to split your list evenly between fantasy clients you’d work for no matter what the pay (living-the-dream work) and hotshit commercial clients that will make your resume shine and bank account swell (bread-and-butter work). For example:
BREAD-AND-BUTTER LIST
Sassy & Sassy Advertising
Woohoo.com
Jill Bakes Foundation
And so on . . .
LIVING-THE-DREAM LIST
Working Mama magazine
McSweetpea’s lit journal
Scallions.com satire news site
And so on . . .
Aim high, but don’t aim so high that you need an industrial crane to reach the clients on your wish list. It’s great that you want to see your cartoons grace the pages of The New Yorker or your photos published in National Geographic. But if to date you’ve only sold your work to your cul-de-sac’s eight-page newspaper, you might want to aim for a few customers within reach first, like your city’s daily metro paper, alt weekly, monthly magazine, or Gothamist-style news blog.
Once you’ve come up with your wish list, take some time each week—one hour, two hours, whatever you can spare—to chip away at it. Read about your dream clients online and see what the media’s saying about them. See if anyone you’ve ever met in your life might have a contact at any of these organizations. See if any of your dream clients are advertising for the staff version of what you do as a freelancer, which you should definitely capitalize on. Then figure out the best way to approach them (see Chapter 9 for tips).
Whether you’re just starting out or rolling in referral work, build this time into your weekly or monthly schedule, just as you would a dinner date or massage appointment. Write it in your calendar, set an alarm on your computer, whatever you need to do so you don’t blow it off. If you land a client on the list, cross it off and add another. Don’t wait until you have no work to boost your client base.
Even though I’m more than happy with the work on my plate, I’ve got goals, baby. So I make the time—be it Friday night or Sunday morning—to research and contact new clients I’d sell my right kidney to work with. I’ll often spend an hour or two each week pursuing my dream clients, and much more if I find my workload dwindling or myself growing stagnant.
Even now, as I’m racing toward the finish line with writing this book, I’m collecting potential new client names, stockpiling article ideas, and lining up work for when I’m done. The way I see it, if you’re not continually marketing yourself and climbing the client food chain, you’re just treading water.
Chapter 9
Sales Pitch 101
How to seal